On 12/31/2019 12:06 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
from ‘The Self’ – Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies
(1997) <https://www.academia.edu/18112359/_The_Self_>
/In the 1990s many analytic philosophers were inclined to deny that
the expression ‘the self’ referred to anything at all. Others said
that its meaning was too unclear for it to be used in worthwhile
philosophical discussion. A third group thought that the only
legitimate use of ‘I’ and ‘the self’ was its use to refer to the human
being considered as a whole. This paper rejects these views. It makes
a proposal about how to endow ‘the self’ with sufficiently clear
meaning without taking it to refer to the whole human being. One needs
to begin with phenomenology, with self-experience, with the experience
of there being such a thing as the self. One can then approach the
questions about metaphysics of the self—questions about the existence
and nature of the self—in the light of the discussion of the
phenomenology of the self./
…
Genuine, realistic materialism requires acknowledgement that the
phenomena of conscious experience are, considered specifically as
such, wholly physical, as physical as the phenomena of extension and
electricity as studied by physics. This in turn requires the
acknowledgement that current physics, considered as a general account
of the nature of the physical, is like Hamlet without the prince, or
at least like Othello without Desdemona. No one who doubts this is a
serious materialist, as far as I can see. Anyone who has had a
standard modern (Western) education is likely to experience a feeling
of deep bewilderment—category-blasting amazement—when entering into
serious materialism, and considering the question ‘What is the nature
of the physical?’ in the context of the thought that the mental (and
in particular the experiential) is physical; followed, perhaps, by a
deep, pragmatic agnosticism.
Even if we grant that there is a phenomenon that is reasonably picked
out by the phrase ‘mental self’, why should we accept that the right
thing to say about some two-second-long mental-self phenomenon is (a)
that it is a thing or object like a rock or a tiger? Why can’t we
insist that the right thing to say is simply (b) that an enduring
(‘physical’) object—Louis—has a certain property, or (c) that a
two-second mental-self phenomenon is just a matter of a certain
process occurring in an object—so that it is not itself a distinct
object existing for two seconds?
I think that a proper understanding of materialism strips (b) and (c)
of any appearance of superiority to (a). As for (c): any claim to the
effect that a mental self is best thought
of as a process rather than an object can be countered by saying that
there is no sense in which a mental self is a process in which a rock
is not also and equally a process. So if a rock is a paradigm case of
a thing in spite of being a process, we have no good reason not to say
the same of a mental self.
This is specious and disingenuous. It's another version of the rock
that computes everything and Strawson must know better.
But if there is a process, there must be something—an object or
substance—in which it goes on. If something happens, there must be
something to which it happens, something which is not just the
happening itself. This expresses our ordinary understanding of things,
but physicists are increasingly content with the view that physical
reality is itself a kind of pure process—even if it remains hard to
know exactly what this idea amounts to. The view that there is some
ultimate stuff to which things happen has increasingly ceded to the
idea that the existence of anything worthy of the name ‘ultimate
stuff’ consists in the existence of fields of energy — consists, in
other words, in the existence of a kind of pure process which is not
usefully thought of as something which is happening to a thing
distinct from it.
As for (b): the object/property distinction is, as Russell says of the
standard distinction between mental and physical, ‘superficial and
unreal’ (1927: 402).
And Russell proposed neutral monism in which the world consists of
events which can be ordered into either the mental life of persons (and
animals) or ordered into physical evolutions, i.e. world lines. Matter
would a subset of the physical orderings. It wouldn't be the
fundamental ontology and so the "neutral" in "neutral monism" meant it
was neither mentalism nor materialism.
Brent
Chronic philosophical difficulties with the question of how to express
the relation between substance and property provide strong negative
support for this view. However ineluctable it is for us, it seems that
the distinction must be as superficial as we must take the distinction
between the wavelike nature and particlelike nature of fundamental
particles to be.
Obviously more needs to be said, but Kant seems to have got it exactly
right in a single clause: ‘in their relation to substance, [accidents]
are not in fact subordinated to it, but are the manner of existence of
the substance itself’.
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@philipthrift
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